When I was a kid, there was just one sort of tap, it was called Sellotape. I didn’t realise it was brand name as such. I just thought that it was the name for anything with that was used to stick things together, other than glue…. a bit like unwittingly using the word “Hoover” instead of vacuum cleaner.

If you visit the B & Q store at Nursling, you can treat it like a museum.

You can find the original product, properly called “Sticky tape”. However, it does not end there… for sometime now, we have had the much tougher duck tape (In 1942, a woman called Vesta Stoudt, who worked packing ammunition boxes, suggested creating a strong, waterproof adhesive tape to seal the boxes and protect them from moisture.

The US military adopted her idea, and the tape became known as duck tape.).

There is also Scotch tape.. fact of the day… this has no connection to Scotland… In 1925, Drew developed masking tape for car painters. The story goes that when he first tested it, the adhesive was only applied to the edges, leaving the middle unstuck. A frustrated car painter reportedly told him:

“Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” At the time, “Scotch” was a derogatory American slang term meaning miserly or cheap.

Then you have frog tape, which is purely a brand name, enhanced by an idea of “signature series with paint block technology.. I think the PR / branding company went into overdrive on that one.

Then finally, you can find gorilla tape. Now, I don’t believe that gorillas stick to wet surfaces…. but this tape apparently does. The name does imply great strength.

So now you know a bit more about tape…. stuff they don’t teach at school.